Rainn Wilson Narrates a New Audiobook of ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’

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By Bruce Handy

May 14, 2019

THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTHBy Norton Juster

Like books of varying allegorical degree it is often compared to — “Gulliver’s Travels,” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” — “The Phantom Tollbooth” is a story about a journey, so I will tell you about my own journey listening to Rainn Wilson’s new audiobook version of Norton Juster’s classic tale.

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I was not coming to it cold, but neither am I a “Phantom Tollbooth” superfan. I don’t go around quoting it at parties or saying it changed my life. (People do.) Like you, I’m guessing, I read the book at some point in childhood — it was published in 1961 — but I have no memory of it aside from that of having loved it. Juster’s satire, wordplay and logical inversion surely appealed to me at an age when I was also a devotee of “Peanuts,” Mad and L. Frank Baum. I am pretty certain, too, that “The Phantom Tollbooth” sparked my lifelong love affair with the cartoons of Jules Feiffer, the book’s illustrator. But beyond that, a blank.

So, five decades later, as I listened to Wilson’s performance of Juster’s book, I felt as if I were meeting the hero, Milo, for the first time. He is a hopelessly incurious and blasé boy who, we are informed in the very first sentence, “didn’t know what to do with himself — not just sometimes, but always.” Milo’s deliverance from intellectual and spiritual torpor is the titular tollbooth, a gift left in his bedroom by persons or forces unknown, which grants him entry into a fantasyland of his own: the “kingdom of Wisdom.” Motoring along Stuart Little-style in a breezy electric car, he visits the warring cities of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis; escapes the circuitous, enervating roads of the Doldrums; is briefly stranded on the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping, of course); meets a conductor whose orchestra plays colors; visits a curator who has a vault where she files away vintage sounds so they don’t interfere with new ones. “For instance, look here,” she tells Milo, opening a drawer and pulling out an envelope. “This is the exact tune George Washington whistled when he crossed the Delaware on that icy night in 1777.” Nearly everything in the kingdom is at cross-purposes, but with the help of new friends — Tock (part dog, part timepiece: a literal watchdog) and the jovial if ineffective Humbug (a nice nod to “Oz”) — Milo rescues the princesses Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason, who restore to the realm a measure of just what their names suggest. As for Milo, he returns home transformed, no longer a bored sad sack, now eager to savor “the special smell of each day.”

You might not think that Wilson, best known for his role as the officious and creepy Dwight Schrute on “The Office,” would be the person to record a whimsical children’s book, but he reads Juster’s prose with all due lightness and verve, even managing to translate puns designed for the page, like the passage in which a character sets Milo straight by saying, “Oh no … I’m the Whether Man, not the Weather Man, for after all it’s more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be.”

From ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’

Norton Juster’s classic children’s story, read by Rainn Wilson.

And yet, despite the actor’s audible affection for the book, the story itself struck my middle-aged, 2019 ears as more effortful than effervescent — less Swift or Carroll or Baum than third-rate Marx Brothers. An overextended dad joke with literary aspirations. Listening, I grew glummer and glummer. Great children’s books speak to all age groups, but perhaps “The Phantom Tollbooth” is one of those slightly less great children’s books that offer much to 10-year-olds and not so much to everyone else? Or perhaps time has not been kind to it? Maybe Juster’s earnest, mildly subversive playfulness, which dipped a toe or two into the brewing countercultural energies of the early ’60s, has turned cloying with age? Well, it was published the same year Peter, Paul and Mary formed.

But halfway through, as an experiment, I turned Wilson off, returned to the physical book, and started reading to myself. Relief! The wordplay turned funny, the allegory amusing. Why that was, I don’t really know. It’s not that I’m a better reader to myself than Wilson is aloud. Maybe Juster’s story is like an aircraft so delicate, light and improbable that being spoken adds just enough drag to bring it down. Undoubtedly, the absence of Feiffer’s drawings is a big loss, because he doesn’t just illustrate scenes from the story; his loose and feathery yet still precise line is the perfect visual analogue to Juster’s arch but gentle tone.

The end point of this journey: Should you desire an audiobook of “The Phantom Tollbooth,” this is a fine one; but me, I’m leaving it in the vault with Washington’s whistling.

Bruce Handy is an editor at Esquire and the author of “Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult.” His first book for children will be published next year.